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Biology might not be quantum, but its math is quantumlike

40 pointsby 2d agoquantamagazine.org
13 comments
1d agoHN ↗

"Almost Entangled" - the new Quantumlike Rom Com coming to a movie theater near you !

8m agoHN ↗

That's fair. Quantum is an extremely fragile state - any perturbance will collapse the field state into an observed classical physics value. This is why complex machinery and near absolute zero temperatures are required to maintain it. I guess 'quantumlike' just felt like an affront to the science of it all.

3h agoHN ↗

I feel like a higher n-dimensional being observing time in a completely different way through those images, as if I could touch the bird at any of those points if I wanted.

Such a simple concept but really remarkable work.

2h agoHN ↗

I feel there is enough happening in the brain that we need to understand it further beyond classical physics can allow. I suspect especially that a mother and child share a strong lifelong subspace bond, whereby they can sense one another's state, in a way that logic or physics cannot explain. This sensing bond probably exists with others too but at an exponentially weaker level. I am not asserting anything, only begging inquiry.

2h agoHN ↗

you could scientifically test this easily put n mothers and children in adjacent rooms and smack half the kids and measure the mothers opinion of the childs state. id wager no statistically difference

10m agoHN ↗

There are two caveats:

1. The mothers cannot be told in advance anything about what will happen to their children, otherwise they will trigger false positives.

2. The objective is not merely to study the population-level rate, but also to engage in CIA-style experimentation whereby the experimenters try to find the few individuals that reproducibly have a substantially higher rate than of the population.

2h agoHN ↗

This is some of the coolest photography I have ever seen. Using multiple shots as a "discrete long exposure": I have never thought to do in this way.

52m agoHN ↗

Bilology is quantum? It is the bottom of the food chain.

https://www.kavlifoundation.org/news/unraveling-the-quantum-...

Edit: FTA, "In photosynthesis, for example, organisms use specialized pigments and proteins to harvest light with nearly perfect quantum efficiency; they convert almost every incoming photon into useful chemical energy."

Edit: this is about standing waves and overtones: "In 2024, Scholes found a way to design complex networks of oscillators such that they produced emergent states — stable patterns of synchronized behavior, like a crowd that claps in time — that could be mathematically described as vectors in a Hilbert space."

23m agoHN ↗

I feel like "is biology quantum?" gates are kept in a needlessly stringent way.

They say that biological systems are too warm for quantum coherence to persist long enough to have meaningful effects. But if you have some molecule whose conformation is in a superposition of states--however briefly--and then the environment causes it to decohere and take on some fully determined non-quantum shape... that actual shape is still one of many possible ones into which it did not decohere. The environment has still hacked probability to trigger decoherence into this shape and not some other one, and evolution leans on this.

If you took a classical bag and filled it with classical locks and classical keys and just shook it around for a while, none of those keys would end up in the locks. But because of this quantum lubricant, ligands binding receptors do find themselves in the appropriate conformation to facilitate signal transduction, even at low concentrations. It's absolutely astounding that it works at all, and in a fully classical world it wouldn't for the same reason that the keys don't end up in the locks when you shake the bag for a while.

Biology is plenty quantum, and the people who are here to tell you it isn't are citing the abundance of interactions as evidence that it is not quantum, but it's through those many interactions that its quantum nature expresses itself.

Maybe it's not spooky-action-at-a-distance style quantum. Maybe it's not indeterminate enough for this theoretical purpose or that one. If you're trying to cram god in there, well it might not be quite spooky enough for that, but so much of what happens in the macroscopic world would not happen if the quantum world were not as strange as it is, and that's doubly true for biology.

14m agoHN ↗

adjacent possibly related interesting fact , classically the temperature required to crosss the coulumb repulsion and fuse hydrogen in the sun is far higher than at the core of the sun,

what makes fusion viable at the core is there is a chance for nuclei tunneling through the barrier , that and the sheer size of the sun